The office of the Registrar of Evaluation at the university found records for a medical student matching the name Mohammed Haneef and the year of his graduation, 2002, on the basis of inquiries made by the media in Australia.

Dr S Sacchidanand, Registrar of Evaluation, said authorities in the two countries interested in Haneef’s links had not directly sought the information. He was detained at Brisbane airport while waiting to fly to India via Kuala Lumpur.

On the basis of the name provided and the year of graduation, Mohammed Haneef, now 27, has been identified as a permanent resident of Mudigere town in Chikamagalur district, located some 250 km from Bangalore.

The son of a Mudigere schoolteacher, the late Abdul Sami Khaleel, Haneef obtained a medical seat in 1997 on merit after scoring 83 per cent marks in his pre-university course in the town of Ujjire near Mangalore in Karnataka.

He studied at the Dr B R Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore, always clearing his medical exams in the first attempt. In his first and second year at the college, he scored first class marks of 699/1000 and 949/1400 respectively. In his final two years, he notched second-class marks of 575/900 and 1027/1750.

College authorities said there were at least five persons with the name Mohammed Haneef in the college during the period 1997-2002.

The Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Science to which the college is affiliated, however, said their computerised records revealed only three persons with the name Mohammed Haneef in the past decade and only one graduating in the year 2002.

He is believed to have completed a post-graduation at the B R Ambedkar Medical College itself in 2003 before moving to the UK.

Residents at a local address provided for Haneef in the university records said he had shifted out in 2000. Haneef is reported to have been at the Halton Hospital at Runcor in Britain in 2005 before moving to Queensland in Australia to take up a position as a registrar at the Gold Coast Hospital.

Meanwhile, officials at the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences also claimed to have been able to only find a partial match to a second name supplied by the British media — said to be of a 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool on Saturday.

“We were told that the name of a second doctor Mohammed Asif Ali, one year junior to Md Haneef had cropped up. Our records show only one Md Asif and another Md Naseem Ali as graduating in 2003. We are awaiting more details to verify this name,” Dr Sacchidanand said.

Local police said they would wait for more information to come in to begin investigations here.